Joseph Schupack - The Dead Years: Holocaust Memoirs

I have always wanted to write down the experiences of my life. That I finally decided to do so after 40 years can only be attributed to the support of my wife and sons. Moreover, I have reached a certain age and I may not have that much time left .

I have often told my children about events in my life and the Holocaust. However, I have never been able to record chronologically the essential facts of my own life and those of my family, friends and acquaintances in different places and in other times. With this book I hope that I have at least partially succeeded. It was important to me to create a monument to the dead to whom I owe so much, especially the members of my cherished Hevra .

I have tried to truthfully record my experiences during those horrible years and to include names, places and dates so that my story may serve as the sworn testimony of an eyewitness for the prosecution .

The fact that our enemies and those who feel their own guilt or that of their fathers dare to deny Auschwitz or compare the Holocaust with some small war, obliges all those who survived the slaughter to describe the truth in as great detail as possible. - Joseph Schupack

T he events of childhood are decisive. Pleasant memories keep us happy for a lifetime, whereas bad ones can never be forgotten .

My memories go back to the town of Radzyn-Podlaski, a small sleepy county seat between the rivers Bug and Vistula, in the center of Poland. I was born there in 1922, and lived there with my parents, two sisters and an older brother in a typical Jewish shtetl .

Radzyn was inhabited by approximately 5,000 Jews and about twice as many Poles. The town and its environs had seen some famous Jews, such as the Radzyner Rebbe, the head of a Chassidic dynasty, and Zionist leader Menachim Begin, later prime minister of Israel, born in the nearby town of Brest- Litovsk .

The Jews lived their own lives. The Hebrew Tarbut School, the big library, the youths thirst for knowledge, and the activities of the different parties and organizations were the focus of Jewish life. Jews who had turned away from their religion seemed to seek out alternative strong ideologies, and so there were many of these organizations and movements, often with youth wings, ranging from the very orthodox to the completely secular and from the Zionist to the anti-Zionist. Some became Communists, although this was illegal in Poland and could result in arrest .

My small existence, like that of my friends, centered around my parents home, the Hebrew School, and the Zionist youth organization of which the school was a part Hashomer-Hatzair, a left-leaning, secular group that encouraged its members to make Aliyah and emigrate to Palestine, at that time under the British Mandate. There in Radzyn, on the fertile ground of the Diaspora, we were nourished with love for Eretz-Israel. It was necessary to teach Zionism; we were born in Zionism and we grew up with it. The Polish national holidays of May 3 and November 11 were only pro forma holidays for us; our holidays were Purim and Hanukah. The biblical prophets and Chaim Nachman Bialik were our poets. Negev, Judea and Galilee were our provinces. The pictures we drew as children always depicted the sun, palm trees and the Star of David. Our coins went into the Keren-Kayemeth piggy banks. We were always concerned about recent developments in Eretz- Israel .

I could speak and understand the Polish language, but it didnt come naturally. Like most Jews in Poland at that time, my siblings and I didnt attend Polish schools, and the family spoke Yiddish with each other at home. When we werent speaking Yiddish, Hebrewboth the ancient language of the synagogue and the modern Hebrew (which was not that different) taught in the youth movementbecame our common language .

Thus we lived our own lives. My family was not traditional in the strictest religious sense. We followed the main holidays and the Sabbath, but not the myriad of rules that dictated the lives of Orthodox Jews. Mainstream Orthodoxy didnt approve of the Zionist movement, but we were free to participate in it. I planned, when I finished school, to attend the agricultural school of Ben Shemen in Palestine. Early Zionists were encouraged to go to Palestine to cultivate the land, and by doing so become ever more connected to it .

But things turned out differently. Even as a child I knew that being born and growing up in this town and in this country could only mean misfortune for a Jew. As Jews, we learned very early in life that most Polish children had ingested anti-Semitism along with their mothers milk. For that reason, we had to learn at an early age to live with anti- Semitism .

I remember the terminology used by the Polish government at that time, calling Poland a major power in Central Europe. According to them, the founder and leader of the state, Marshall Jzef Pisudski, was a great general. Poland claimed colonies in Africa, just as Germany was demanding more living space. In the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish Parliament, most of the discussions involved accusations against Jews. At the universities Jewish students were heckled and often attacked by Polish anti-Semites. It seemed it was the in thing in Polish society to be an anti- Semite .

Also unforgettable was the widespread lie among Polish children, and some adults, that Jesus had been a Pole and that the Jews had killed him. This often-heard accusation would make it sound as if the event had happened only yesterday and every Jew was implicated in the crime. Jews were still accused of using gentile blood in Passover rituals. For these reasons, we Jewish children were ridiculed with insulting songs, which I still cannot forget. Every Christmas and Easter the accusations were revived, with new insults and affronts, often further emphasized by breaking windows. Sometimes I felt that I had known from my earliest days in the cradle that there was no place in this country or city for young Jews of my upbringing, class and education .

At that time more than 3 million Jews lived in Poland. The daily life of this minority was characterized by poverty, cultural suppression, limited freedoms, economic boycots, persecution and vicious anti-Semitism. Poland was a country of economic misery, overwhelmed with the problems of rebuilding a state that had been divided for 150 years between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, with substantial national minorities problems which had only intensified since the 19141918 war. It was also a place of religious fanaticism, rooted in the Roman Catholicism which lay at the heart of Polish nationalism. The Jews were always used as scapegoats and found guilty of everything by parliament, press and Church. Polish anti-Semitism was a sentiment largely propagated by the ruling class, who thought they should equal or even surpass the Nazis intense hatred of Jews. Ordinary people, managed and encouraged by these rulers, executed this hatred through various forms of persecution .

I remember one of the traditional outings from my Hebrew Tarbut school on the Jewish holiday of Lag-Baomer, to a forest several kilometers from town. With 250 students, we started out at 6 a.m. and marched to the woods, where we planned to stay until evening. The sun was shining as we played and sang. It was still early in the morning when three drunken Polish hoodlums suddenly appeared. They threatened our principal and the teachers with knives, and demanded that we leave the woods immediately. All attempts to placate them were in vain. They claimed that we made the woods smell of garlic and Jews, which was not to their liking. In any event, forests were not made for Jews. The situation became so tense that we were forced to leave .